Yahoo Acquires Snip.it; Personalized Yahoo Homepage?

Yahoo has acquired a San Franscisco based content curation startup Snip.it, which organizes webclips in a Pinterest like format. This was first reported by AllThingsD.

While Yahoo or Snip.it didn’t disclose the terms of the acquisition or the acquisition amount, a TechCrunch report suggests that Yahoo acquired the startup for $10 million along with several million dollars worth earn-outs tied to team retention. Citing a source familiar to the deal, the report also suggested that nine of the ten Snip.it employees will join Yahoo. Snip.it has already shut down its service and has offered users to download their data until February 21, 2013, indicating that this was a talent acquisition.

While Snip.it has not disclosed any specific details on what they will be building at Yahoo, the company mentioned on its website that it will working on improving Yahoo’s social news offering. This looks to be inline with Yahoo’s strategy to be a one-stop content destination for its users.

While the web has evolved, users have been increasingly looking forward to personalize the web experience as per their needs rather than depending on machine based algorithms to find content on a website. What a best way to do that by handling the responsibility on friends or people you follow to curate the content for you. This is one of reason why Twitter works – people follow users who bring curate content to them. Yahoo had previously tried to provide personalized content through My Yahoo, which did not click with the users.

Advertisement

With Snip.it acquisition, one can imply that Yahoo might try to personalize its homepage for curated content, which is important for Yahoo since it’s homepage has been one of key money making source for the company, and has seen a decline in the number of page views of late, as indicated by Comscore metrics.

Previous Acquisitions

Ever since Marissa Mayer took over the reins as the Yahoo CEO in July 2012, the company has made quite a few acquisitions.

In October 2012, it acquired the New York-based mobile recommendation app Stamped, following which the app was shut down and the website now redirects to Yahoo! Mobile page. In December 2012, Yahoo acquired a video chat broadcasting startup OnTheAir to strengthen its mobile team and possibly compete with Google Hangouts.

A week later, an AllThingsD report suggested that Yahoo was looking to acquire the iPhone news reading app Summly, although there was no official confirmation from either Yahoo or Summly regarding the acquisition later.

Earlier in the month, Yahoo had appointed Disney/ABC Television Group’s Sandy Gould as its senior vice president of global talent acquisition and development and was responsible for leading Yahoo’s talent acquisition and development efforts.